Memorial Tribute

The following is the tribute given by Morawetz' daughter, Claudia, at the Memorial Concert on June 28, 2007.

It’s hard to believe that my father is really gone.

It’s hard to believe, even though I have received an overwhelming outpouring of phone calls, e-mail and cards of condolence, not only from those of you I know, but also from many friends and musicians of my father whom I had only heard of by name, or in some cases, had never heard of before. Many of you included some personal story of your connection with my father, stories that were new to me, but so clearly recalled the father I knew, and made him come alive to me, if even for a brief moment. I thank you all very much.

My father’s passing will probably really begin to hit me in the next few weeks, when I no longer make my weekly Tuesday visits to his retirement home. But in a way, I hope these visits with my father, bound to his wheelchair, unable to communicate properly, and most sadly, unable to enjoy music, will fade from memory, and that I will remember the younger Oskar, the generous, kind-hearted Oskar, the witty and absent-minded Oskar, the incredible musician and teacher, and Oskar, the doting, protective and devoted father.

One of the best things my husband did after the funeral was to reminisce with me about some of the funny and endearing stories about my father. This was a huge catharsis for me, and helped me to turn my focus away from the immediacy of his death, and more towards remembering the wonderful and long life he had. I would like to share with you some of our family’s memories, as well as other characteristic stories that personify the Oskar we all knew.

My father grew up in Czechoslovakia in a non-musical family, but somehow music was gifted upon him. He started piano lessons at the age of 6, quickly surpassing all of his three siblings, and his teacher ascertained he had perfect pitch before he even knew what perfect pitch was. He had such a hunger for learning new music that he sight-read operas and scores, anything he could get his hands onto, much to the annoyance of his piano teachers who felt he should be spending his weeks perfecting his technique. He even brought scores to school and read them under his desk, resulting in his being a very poor student in all the other, quote, “boring” school subjects.

As recordings were not nearly as common when my father was a boy as they are today, he rarely had an opportunity to listen to music, and so relied on learning the musical literature by playing through scores on his piano. The rare time that his father bought him some recorded music, he wound up the old gramophone and listened to 3 minutes of music at a time, cranking up the gramophone between intervals before the music slowed to a stop. But his perseverance meant that he developed an encyclopaedic mind to the classical music repertoire, which served him well as both composer and a teacher.

His brother Herbert related an incident where he was talking with my father, and somewhere a radio started playing some music. My father abruptly interrupted the conversation with "Shhh! I want to listen." After a few seconds of listening to the music, Herbert asked his brother if he had ever heard the music before, whereupon my father replied: "No. But I read the score some 10 years ago."

One of the many e-mails which I received in the past week, was from composer Malcolm Forsyth. In a story that further exemplifies my father’s almost photographic memory, Dr. Forsyth wrote the following:

On two occasions in the early 90s he invited me to stay at his house in Duncannon, when I had to spend a few days in Toronto. He was a wonderful host, absent-minded and all. Many times I have told the story of how he insisted on studying my new score, for the première of which I had come to Toronto. I thought he would like to flip quickly through it while I pointed out a few salient points. But no... he stayed on page 1 and refused to let me turn over. "Sorry Oskar," I said, "I must go now. I have to be at the rehearsal in half an hour". He surrendered the score to me, reluctantly. He spent the rest of the afternoon composing and I returned to the house at about 5:30, score tucked under my arm. As I walked in the front door, he started to play the piano, calling out a greeting as he did so. What did he play? My new score. Page 1. Complete. Flawlessly. He had memorised it after seeing it for a few minutes earlier that afternoon! It was almost unbelievable. What an amazing gift. What an unforgettable and lovable character. We are all richer who knew him.

As a professor, my father loved teaching the young musicians in this very building. After retiring in 1982, he still taught a couple more years because, as he said, it made him feel young, and he wanted to keep in touch with the new gifted students coming through the faculty. His knowledge of music served him well as an inspiring teacher. When a student once complained about a mark he received, even though he had “followed the rules of harmony faithfully”, my father replied: “Exams are written by people who have never composed”, and proceeded to play a few bars of Mozart to show how he too had broken the rules.

I don’t need to speak about how my father developed as a pianist or composer. I think his legacy, beginning with the concert this evening will speak for itself. Instead, I would like to recall stories about Oskar, my father, as a person.

All of us who knew him well know how much he loved a good joke. Right from when he was a young boy, he was the ringleader among the three brothers, dreaming up all sorts of pranks.

His mother used to hold bridge parties, and one evening before the guests arrived, Oskar pulled all the 2s out of one of the two decks of cards. He then watched with glee as the game proceeded and no-one seemed to notice that one less round was played when the sabotaged deck of cards was used. Fearing his mother's wrath, Oskar didn't tell her about this prank until many years later.

He liked to goad his younger sister, especially when it came to music. She would go to practise her piano, and after a while, Oskar would sing along with the piece she was playing. But then he would sing faster and faster, forcing her to play more quickly in order to keep up with him. Finally she would just give up practising in frustration at her annoying brother.

As an adult, Oskar won the hearts of many friends and musicians he met by breaking the ice with an anecdote pertinent to the situation. I remember when he won SOCAN’s concert music award in 1994, in his thank-you speech, he related a story poking fun at himself and all contemporary composers. The story was about two ladies attending a concert. One of the ladies was looking back and forth at the program. When her comrade asked her what she was doing, she explained: “I am looking at the dates after the composers’ names; and if there is only one date, then I know I will not like it!”

Although my father lived in Canada most of his life, he never lost his heavy Czech accent. He could communicate in six languages, three of which he picked up during his escape from Nazi Europe, and that was more important to him than trying to pass himself off as a native English-speaker. Once some unpleasant person commented about how he could have done a better job at mastering English, whereupon my father, who always had a quick wit, replied: "It is better to speak six languages with an accent, than to speak just one the way you do!"

Jokes aside, my father was a very congenial person. I remember him telling me once how he had read the 1930s best seller, How to win friends and influence people. This book propounded that in order for people to take an interest in you, you had to take an interest in them. My father really took these words to heart, and had a genuine interest in other people. I recall being with him once when he met a rather introverted conductor after a concert. The conductor seemed bored at having to be polite to yet another music admirer. But after a few minutes of my father telling the conductor some obscure fact about the work he had just conducted, and asking him his opinion of some other fine detail of music, my father gradually drew the conductor into an engaging musical discussion.

My father was also organized beyond belief. He had every one of his cassette tapes, and their predecessors, the reel-to-reel tapes, numbered and catalogued so that he could quickly find any recording of any performance of any one of his works. When he took up photography at the late age of 56, he annotated his photographs and organized the negatives equally methodically. Even the mechanics of composing was organized: if he was writing a page for an orchestral score that happened to be in 3/4 time, he laid a cardboard sheet under his transparent manuscript paper that had evenly spaced red lines for the bar lines, and 3 green lines evenly spaced between the red lines for each of the beats in the measure. If the next page was in 9/8, he pulled out his 9/8 cardboard. He had one of these cardboards for every time signature and number of bars per page imaginable.

My father was a kind-hearted, generous person. He demonstrated this not only in the numerous organizations to which he donated money, but also in more pro-active ways: everything from helping a friend get out of communist Czechoslovakia, helping talented young musicians establish their careers, to faithfully making regular visits to elderly friends.

And of course, we all know that my father was the epitome of the absent-minded professor. Although I saw plenty of that in action, in a way, his absent-mindedness was almost endearing. I remember at the rehearsal for my wedding, the minister told my father that he was to walk me down the aisle, and when we came to the front of the church, he was to give me a kiss, and then shake my future husband’s hand, before taking his place in the pew. Well, on the day of the wedding, I don’t know if my father was nervous, absent-minded or what, but when we reached the front of the church, he took my hand and started leaning in towards my husband. When I realized what he was trying to do, I quickly whispered to my father: “Kiss ME and shake KEVIN’S hand!”

These are some of the memories that I hope stay with me forever, just as I will always remember this lovely musical tribute to my father this evening. I am so deeply appreciative of all the wonderful musicians who unhesitatingly agreed to participate in this Memorial Concert, some who have known my father for years, and have performed and recorded his music in the past, and others who are just learning his music for the first time. Thank you so much to all of you, and also to the faculty of music for providing the staff and facilities in the place in which my father taught for almost 40 years.


Before I finish, as you have no program notes, I want to talk briefly about the last two pieces you will hear this evening.

I very much wanted a string quartet to play in this concert, for several reasons. Firstly, I think it is an instrumental combination which my father was particularly fond of: his opus #1, his graduating piece for his Bachelor of Music degree was a string quartet. Over his 50-year composing career, he wrote six quartets in all.
The 6th quartet was a commission by the CBC for the inaugural concert in the Glenn Gould studio at the opening of the new CBC building in 1992. The CBC asked three composers whose music Glenn Gould had recorded in the past to write one movement of a quartet that "bore some relation to Gould's life and art" (the other two composers were Istvan Anhalt and Jacques Hétu). My father had known Glenn Gould since he was 13 years old, and from many conversations with him, was well acquainted with the composers whom Gould both adored and abhorred. We all know of Gould's unwavering admiration for Bach, and so my father decided to write a work based on four inventions by Bach, (and I quote) "clothed in the harmonic language of Gould's favourite romantic composers": Wagner, Richard Strauss and Schoenberg. This quartet, which was a tribute to a man my father admired, seemed like a fitting tribute to a man that I, and many others admired.

The Suk Love Song may seem like an odd ending to a concert of Morawetz music. However this piece has special meaning to my father.
My father loved the music of Czech compatriot, Suk, and when he was living in Prague, he attended a series of four concerts of symphonic poems by Suk. At one of these concerts he met Suk, and asked him to autograph a photo of him. Suk died a year later, and my father believes he has the last photograph taken of him.
At the age of 16, my father gave his first piano recital in his native town of Světlá, and at that recital, he played Suk’s Love Song. This was the first of many times that he would perform this piece, even after he came to Canada and was still appearing as a pianist. It is an honour that his long-time friend, and another fellow Czech musician, Antonin Kubalek, will play the piece for my father.

Enjoy and thank you.